Your Marketing Is Your Company

In my blog post this morning, I would like to confront a rampant misconception about marketing.

It is that marketing is something that a company does - just another activity like HR, accounting, training or product development.

I would like to blow that misconception to bits. Because marketing is not something your company does.

Marketing is your company

Nor is your company bricks and mortar, or even a Web page. Which leads me to another statement.

Your company is your customer

If you don't orient everything you do around your customer, you don't have a business. If you doubt what I am saying, let's consider the life cycle of a typical new small company. It usually goes something like this:

A would-be entrepreneur gets an idea for a product or a service business. He or she writes a business plan. Next comes funding, which the entrepreneur uses to pay for an office, equipment, a Website and employees. Then it is time to think about customers.

And because the customer was left out of the process until the very end of the process, the enterprise fails. In some cases, the entrepreneur can save the enterprise by retrofitting the earlier steps - product development and so on - with the customer in mind. But that costs lots of extra time, effort and money.

The solution is to put your customers at the epicenter of your planning from day one. They cannot become an afterthought. If you doubt the cost of ignoring them for too long, remember the many historical examples of companies that squandered $millions to develop failed products. From New Coke to the IBM PC Jr. to the Edsel, the woods are littered with the shells of failed products that nobody wanted to buy.

As we explore inThe Marketing Mastery Program, one of my courses at Trump University, the success of your new enterprise requires you to focus on two marketing basics from the moment a promising entrepreneurial idea enters your mind:

Targeting - Know exactly who your customers will be. Not sort of, but exactly. Understand their needs. Then decide how you can satisfy those needs more effectively than your competitors can.

Positioning - Identify one, two or perhaps three benefits that your specific customers want, and that you can provide at a level superior to your competitors. If you are opening a health club and want to target young mothers, for example, be the only club in your area that provides childcare. Positioning requires you to know who your target customer is, and what your competition is offering.

In summary . . .

Your marketing, your customer and your company are one and the same. If you keep that in mind from day one of your new business development, entrepreneurial accomplishment - and supreme success - can be yours.

Donald Sexton, PhD, is Trump University's professor of marketing. He is also Professor of Business at Columbia University and President of The Arrow Group,a leading marketing consulting group. Dr. Sexton teaches The Marketing Mastery Program at Trump University.